In transhumanism and science fiction, mind transfer (also referred to as mind uploading or mind downloading, depending on one's point of reference), whole body emulation, or electronic transcendence refers to the hypothetical transfer of a human mind to an artificial substrate. Natasha Vita-Mores Primo is an artistic depiction of a hypothetical posthuman of transhumanist speculation. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ...

Thinkers with a strongly mechanistic view of human intelligence (such as Marvin Minsky) or a strongly positive view of robot-human social integration (such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil) have openly speculated about the possibility and desirability of this. Intelligence is the mental capacity to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Hans Moravec is a permanent resident research professor at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon) of Carnegie Mellon University known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. ... Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. ...

In the case where the mind transferred into a computer, the subject would become a form of artificial intelligence, sometimes called an infomorph or "noomorph". In a case where it is transferred into an artificial body, to which its consciousness is confined, it would become a robot, albeit one that might claim ordinary human rights, certainly if the consciousness within were feeling (or were doing a good job of simulating) as if it were the donor. // Hondas intelligent humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... The term Infomorph refers to a consciousness uploaded or downloaded into a computer (mind transfer) from a biological entity. ... ASIMO, a humanoid robot manufactured by Honda. ...

Uploading consciousness into bodies created by robotic means is a goal of some in the artificial intelligence community. In the uploading scenario, the physical human brain does not move from its original body into a new robotic shell; rather, the consciousness is assumed to be recorded and/or transferred to a new robotic brain, which generates responses indistinguishable from the original organic brain. In practical usage, a robot is a mechanical device which performs automated tasks, either according to direct human supervision, a pre-defined program or, a set of general guidelines, using artificial intelligence techniques. ... The human brain. ...

The idea of uploading human consciousness in this manner raises many philosophical questions which people may find interesting and disturbing, such as matters of individuality and the soul. Vitalists would say that uploading was a priori impossible. The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self-aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being. ... Vitalism is the doctrine that vital forces are active in living organisms, so that life cannot be explained solely by mechanism. ...

Even if uploading is theoretically possible, there is currently no technology capable of recording or describing mind states in the way imagined, and no one knows how much computational power or storage would be needed to simulate the activity of the mind inside a computer.

Theoretical methods

True mind uploading remains speculation: the technology to perform such a feat is not currently available, nor is it expected to be for several decades at least. A number of methods have however, been suggested to carry out mind transfers in the future.

Blue Brain Project

On June 6, 2005 IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne announced the launch of a project to build a complete simulation of the human brain, entitled the "Blue Brain Project".^[1] The project will use a supercomputer based on IBM's Blue Gene design to map the entire electrical circuitry of the brain. The project seeks to research aspects of human cognition, and various psychiatric disorders caused by malfunctioning neurons, such as autism. Initial efforts are to focus on experimentally accurate, programed characterization of a single neocortical column in the brain of a rat, as it's very alike to a human's but at smaller scale, then to expand to an entire neocortex (the alleged seat of higher intelligence) and eventually the human brain as a whole. Lausanne is a city in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, situated on the shores of Lake Geneva (French: Lac Léman), and facing Évian-les-Bains (France) and with the Jura hills to its north. ... Blue Brain is a project to begin the construction of a simulated brain. ... A cortical column is a group of neurons in the brain cortex which can be successively penetrated by a probe inserted perpendicularly to the cortical surface, and which have nearly identical receptive fields. ... The neocortex (Latin for new bark or new rind) is a part of the brain of mammals. ...

However, it is relatively important to note that according to Henry Markram, lead researcher of the BBP, "it is not [their] goal to build an intelligent neural network." (http://bluebrainproject.epfl.ch/FAQs.htm) On the same page, when asked if he believes a computer can ever be an exact simulation of the human brain, Markram replies exactly as follows:

"This is not likely nor necessary. It will be very difficult because, in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today. Mammals can make very good copies of each other, we do not need to make computer copies of mammals. That is not our goal. We want to try to understand how the biological system functions and malfunctions so that this knowledge can benefit mankind."

Such computing power may become available to us in a relatively new form of optical neural network, using the silicon-photonic chip (harnessing special physical properties of Indium Phosphide), which Intel showed the world for the first time on 9/18/2006, and also perhaps the quantum computer, presently being worked on internationally as well as most famously by computer scientists and physicists at the IBM Almaden Research Center, which promises to be useful in simulating large-scale atomic & sub-atomic physics simulations of high accuracy and fidelity by utilizing quantum mechanics; such ability would enable protein structure prediction likely critical to correct emulation of intracellular neural processes. Present methods require use of massive computational power (as the BBP does with IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer) to use the essentially classical computing architecture for serial deduction of the quantum mechanical processes involved in ab initio protein structure prediction. If necessary, should the quantum computer become a reality, its capacity for exactly such instantaneous calculation of quantum mechanical physics may help the effort, playing some role in filling the void of a far greater computational power, as Markman warns would be needed should an entire brain's simulation, let alone emulation (at both cellular and molecular levels) be feasibly attempted. An optical neural network is an implementation a neural network models with optical components. ... Indium phosphide (InP) is a semiconductor composed of indium and phosphorus. ... The IBM Almaden Research Center, located near San Jose, California is one of IBMs research centers, specializing in both basic research in material science and applied research in things like computer storage, where many refinements and improvements were made in hard disc drive technology. ... Protein structure prediction is one of the most significant technologies pursued by computational structural biology and theoretical chemistry. ...

Transplants

An extremely crude means of moving (if not exactly "uploading") consciousness using current technology is the head transplant which has been done on primates somewhat successfully ^[2]. Another such crude means which some researchers think is feasible in the near term is the whole-body transplant which moves only the brain. Since it is not easy to tell whether a body contains its original brain, nor necessarily easy to tell whether a body has the head it was born with, some of the identity questions are identical for these methods and those based on robotics. However, these methods do not involve copying the mind nor moving it into a non-organic medium, such as an electronic computer. Accordingly, they are technically quite different, and subject to normal limits of organic bodies and brains. A head transplant is a hypothetical surgical operation involving the replacement of an organisms head with a replacement head. ... A whole- moves the brain of one being into the body of another. ... In animals, the brain, or encephalon (Greek for in the head), is the control center of the central nervous system. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with robot. ...

Serial sectioning

A likely method for mind transfer is serial sectioning, in which the brain tissue and perhaps other parts of the nervous system are frozen, sliced apart or ablated layer by layer - a technique now possible automatically by laser, instead of semi-automatically by diamond knife as in a conventional cryoultramicrotome), and scanned at high resolution, perhaps with a transmission electron microscope. The scans would then be reconstructed 3-dimensionally and uploaded by means of an interpretation algorithm to appropriate emulation hardware (i.e., an artificial brain). Such a computer may require microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), or else perhaps optical or nano computiung for comparable speed and reduced size and sophisticated telecommunication between the brain and body (whether it exists in virtual reality, artificially as an android, or cybernetically as in sync with a biological body through a transceiver), but would not seem to require molecular nanotechnology. Simply reproducing the structures visible by electron microscopy, however, would not allow replication of the function of a brain, since the function of brain tissue is determined by molecular events, particularly at synapses, that cannot be revealed by electron microscopy. Sophisticated immunohistochemistry staining methods are required to reveal the protein signatures representative of neural function, and are detectable using Confocal laser scanning microscopy. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is an imaging technique whereby a beam of electrons is focused onto a specimen causing an enlarged version to appear on a fluorescent screen or layer of photographic film (see electron microscope), or can be detected by a CCD camera. ... A mite next to a gear set produced using MEMS. Courtesy Sandia National Laboratories, SUMMiTTM Technologies, www. ... It has been suggested that Molecular engineering be merged into this article or section. ... Illustration of the major elements in a prototypical synapse. ... Immunohistochemistry is the process of detection of antigens in tissue using antibodies. ... Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM or LSCM) is a valuable tool for obtaining high resolution images and 3-D reconstructions. ...

Nanotechnology

A more advanced hypothetical technique that would require nanotechnology might involve infiltrating the intact brain with a network of cell-sized machines to "read" the structure and activity of the brain in situ, much like current-day electrode meshes but on a much finer and more sophisticated scale. This might even allow for the replacement of living neurons with artificial neurons one by one while the subject is still conscious, providing a smooth transition from an organic to synthetic brain - potentially significant for those who worry about the loss of personal continuity that other uploading processes may entail.

"Cyborging"

Another theoretically possible method of mind transfer from organic to inorganic medium, related to the idea described above of replacing neurons one at a time while consciousness remained intact, would be a much less precise but much more feasible (in terms of technology currently known to be physically possible) process of "cyborgisation". Once a given person's brain is mapped, it is replaced piece-by-piece with computer devices which perform the exact same function as the regions preceding them, after which the patient is allowed to regain consciousness and validate that "nothing has changed" in terms of his own subjective experience of his existence. At this point, the patient's brain is immediately "re-mapped" and another piece is replaced, and so on in this fashion until, the patient exists on a purely hardware medium and can be safely extricated from the remaining organic body.

Brain imaging

It may also be possible to use advanced neuroimaging technology to build a detailed three-dimensional model of the brain using non-invasive methods. This possibility, however, could run into physical limitations concerning the resolution that can be achieved. Very high-resolution brain imaging (down to the nanometer) is currently available, but it would require destroying the brain by means of a serial sectioning scan as described above. Neuroimaging includes the use of various techniques to either directly or indirectly image the structure, function, or pharmacology of the brain. ... A nanometre (American spelling: nanometer) is 1. ...

Recreating

It has also been suggested (for example, in Greg Egan's "jewelhead" stories^[3]) that a detailed examination of the brain itself may not be required, that the brain could be treated as a black box instead and effectively duplicated "for all practical purposes" by merely duplicating how it responds to specific external stimuli. This leads into even deeper philosophical questions of what the "self" is. The term black box theory is used in philosophy and in mathematics. ...

One problem with the mind transfer theory is that it might need a near to infinite amount of specific external stimuli since we humans probably have a very wide amount of different responses.

Copying vs. moving

By some definitions, the copied consciousness would "be the same person" as the donor of the consciousness. In that case, this new being -- the same person as the original -- could have all the rights of the consciousness donor, including the disposal of the old body. By other definitions, the two copies would immediately be considered different people and the issue of which copy "inherits" what can be much more complicated. This problem is similar to that found when considering the possibility of teleportation, where in some proposed methods it is possible to copy (rather than only move) a mind. This is the classic philosophical issue of personal identity. Teleportation is the process of moving objects from one place to another more or less instantaneously, without passing through the intervening space. ... In philosophy, the issue of personal identity concerns the conditions under which a person at one time is the same person at another time. ...

Philosopher John Locke published "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" in 1689, in which he proposed the following criterion for personal identity: if you remember thinking something in the past, then you are the same person as he or she who did the thinking. Later philosophers raised various logical snarls, most of them caused by applying Boolean logic, which was the only logic available at the time. It has been proposed that modern fuzzy logic can solve those problems,^[4] showing that Locke's basic idea is sound if one treats personal identity as a continuous rather than discrete value. Boolean logic is a complete system for logical operations. ... Fuzzy logic is derived from fuzzy set theory dealing with reasoning that is approximate rather than precisely deduced from classical predicate logic. ...

In that case, when a mind is copied -- whether during mind uploading, or afterwards, or by some other means -- the two copies are initially two instances of the very same person, but over time, they will gradually become different people to an increasing degree.

Ethical issues of mind uploading

There are many ethical issues concerning mind transfer. Viable mind transfer technology would challenge the ideas of human immortality, property rights, capitalism, human intelligence, an afterlife, and the abrahamic view of man as created in God's image. These challenges often cannot be distinguished from those raised by all technologies that extend human technological control over human bodies, e.g. organ transplant. Perhaps the best way to explore such issues is to discover principles applicable to current bioethics problems, and question what would be permissible if they were applied consistently to a future technology. This points back to the role of science fiction in exploring such problems, as powerfully demonstrated in the 20th century by such works as Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dune and Star Trek, each of which frame current ethical problems in a future environment where those have come to dominate the society. Immortality (or eternal life) is the concept of existing for a potentially infinite, or indeterminate, length of time. ... This page deals with property as ownership rights. ... Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are mostly privately owned, and capital is invested in the production, distribution and other trade of goods and services, for profit in a competitive free market. ... Intelligence is the process and the result of gathering and analysing difficult to obtain or altogether secret information. ... The afterlife (or life after death) is a generic term referring to a continuation of existence, typically spiritual and experiential, beyond this world, or after death. ... Map showing the prevalence of Abrahamic (purple) and Dharmic (yellow) religions in each country. ... An organ transplant is the transplantation of a whole or partial organ from one body to another (or from a donor site on the patients own body), for the purpose of replacing the recipients damaged or failing organ with a working one from the donor site. ... Bioethics is the ethics of biological science and medicine. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Original book cover of Brave New World. ... Nineteen Eighty-Four (commonly abbreviated to 1984) is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell, and first published by Secker and Warburg in 1949. ... Dune is a science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965. ... Star Trek is an American science-fiction franchise spanning six television series, ten feature films, hundreds of novels, computer and video games, and other fan stories. ...

Mind transfer in science fiction

Main article: mind transfer in fiction

Uploading is a common theme in science fiction. One of the earlier instances of this theme was in the Roger Zelazny 1968 novel Lord of Light. Mind transfer is a common theme in science fiction. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Roger Joseph Zelazny (May 13, 1937 – June 14, 1995) was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels. ... Cover of Lord of Light, published by Methuen in 1986. ...

Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mårtensson. A novel in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction. Together with the 1969 book Ubik by Philip K. Dick it takes the subject to its furthest point of all the early novels in the field. Cover of the 1970 Dell paperback edition of Ubik Ubik is a 1969 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. ... Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American science fiction writer. ...

Frederik Pohl's Gateway series (also known as the Heechee Saga) deals with a human being, Robinette Broadhead, who "dies" and, due to the efforts of his wife, a computer scientist (and also quite fetching), as well as the computer program Sigfrid von Shrink, is uploaded into the "64 Gigabit space" (now archaic, but Fred Pohl wrote Gateway in 1976). The Heechee Saga deals with the physical, social, sexual, recreational, and scientific nature of cyberspace before William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer, and the interactions between cyberspace and "meatspace" commonly depicted in cyberpunk fiction. In Neuromancer, a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete. Frederik Pohl (born November 26, 1919) is a noted American science fiction writer and editor, with a career spanning over sixty years. ... Gateway is a 1976 science fiction novel by Frederick Pohl. ... William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948, Conway, South Carolina) is an American-born science fiction author resident in Canada since 1968. ... Neuromancer (ISBN 0006480411), by William Gibson, is the most famous early cyberpunk novel and won the so-called science-fiction triple crown (the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Hugo Award) after being published in 1984. ... Berlins Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz reflects the global reach of a Japanese corporation. ...

In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal. The Ware Tetralogy is a series of four novels by science fiction author Rudy Rucker. ... Rudolf Rucker, Fall 2005. ... It has been suggested that Bio Android be merged into this article or section. ... Immortality (or eternal life) is the concept of existing for a potentially infinite, or indeterminate, length of time. ...

The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora, "Copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed. Greg Egan (August 20, 1961, Perth, Western Australia) is an Australian computer programmer and science fiction author. ... Permutation City is a science fiction novel (ISBN 1-85798-218-5) by Greg Egan which explores quantum ontology via the various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulations of intelligence. ... Diaspora is a 1997 science fiction novel by Australian writer Greg Egan. ...

In the popular video game Total Annihilation the 4,000 year war which eventually ended with the destruction of the Milky Way galaxy was started over the issue of mind transfer, with one group (the Arm) resisting another group (the Core) who were attempting to enforce a 100% conversion of all humanity into machines, because machines are durable and modular, thereby allegedly making it a "public health measure". Total Annihilation (TA) is a futuristic real-time strategy (RTS) videogame, created in 1997 by Chris Taylor and Cavedog Entertainment. ...

In the popular science fiction show Stargate SG-1 the alien race who call themself the Asgard rely solely on cloning and mind transferring to continue their existence. This was not a choice they made, but a result of the decay of the Asgard genome due to excessive cloning, which also caused the Asgard to lose their ability to reproduce. Stargate SG-1 (often abbreviated as SG-1) is an American science fiction television series based upon the 1994 science fiction film Stargate. ... In the science fiction series Stargate SG-1, the Asgard are a benevolent, highly advanced and evolved race from another galaxy, called Ida, who have visited Earth on many occasions, giving rise to the Norse legends. ... In biology the genome of an organism is the whole hereditary information of an organism that is encoded in the DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA). ...

Mind transfer advocates

The Raëlian religion believes that mind uploading is practiced by extra-terrestrial beings who will teach these skills to mankind. Raels first published book, the basis of the Raelian movement Raëlism is the belief system promoted by the Raëlian Movement, a religious organization which believes that scientifically advanced extraterrestrials known as the Elohim (one of the words used to refer to God in the Torah) created life...

However, mind uploading is also advocated by a number of secular researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, such as Marvin Minsky. In 1993, Joe Strout created a small web site called the Mind Uploading Home Page, and began advocating the idea in Cryonics circles and elsewhere on the net. That site has not been actively updated in recent years, but it has spawned other sites including MindUploading.org, run by Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., who also moderates a mailing list on the topic. These advocates see mind uploading as a medical procedure which could eventually save countless lives. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Cryonics (often mistakenly called cryogenics) is the practice of cryopreserving humans or animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. ...

Many Transhumanists look forward to the development and deployment of mind uploading technology, ideally before the end of the 21st century. Many view it as the end phase of the Transhumanist project, which might be said to begin with the genetic engineering of biological humans, continue with the cybernetic enhancement of genetically engineered humans, and finally obtain with the replacement of all remaining biological aspects. Natasha Vita-Mores Primo is an artistic depiction of a hypothetical posthuman of transhumanist speculation. ...

The book Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds by Gregory S. Paul & Earl D. Cox, is about the eventual (and, to the authors, almost inevitable) evolution of computers into sentient beings, but also deals with human mind transfer. Gregory S. Paul (born 1954) is a freelance paleontologist, author and illustrator. ... A Lego RCX Computer is an example of an embedded computer used to control mechanical devices. ... Sentience is a capacity for basic consciousness—the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. ...

Raymond Kurzweil, a prominent advocate of transhumanism and the likelihood of a technological singularity, has suggested that the easiest path to human-level artificial intelligence may lie in "reverse-engineering the human brain", which he usually uses to refer to the creation of a new intelligence based on the general "principles of operation" of the brain, but he also sometimes uses the term to refer to the notion of uploading individual human minds based on highly detailed scans and simulations. This idea is discussed on pp. 198-203 of his book The Singularity is Near, for example. Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced: ) (b. ... Natasha Vita-Mores Primo is an artistic depiction of a hypothetical posthuman of transhumanist speculation. ... When plotted on a logarithmic graph, 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. ... // Hondas intelligent humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... Cover of the book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Books, ISBN 0-670-03384-7) is a 2005 update of Raymond Kurzweils 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and his 1987 book The Age of Intelligent Machines. ...

See also

• soul
• Turing test
• teleportation
• virtual reality
• artificial intelligence
• brain-computer interface

The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self-aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being. ... The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machines capability to perform human-like conversation. ... Teleportation is the process of moving objects from one place to another more or less instantaneously, without passing through the intervening space. ... Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, be it a real or imagined one. ... // Hondas intelligent humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... // A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device. ...

References

1. ^ Herper, Matthew (June 6, 2005). IBM Aims To Simulate A Brain. Forbes. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
2. ^ Newquist, Harvey P. (2005). The Great Brain Book. Scholastic.
3. ^ Egan, Greg (1995). “Learning to Be Me”, Axiomatic. ISBN 1-85798-281-9.
4. ^ Strout, Joe (2/09/97). The Issue of Personal Identity. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.

2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... May 19 is the 139th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (140th in leap years). ... Axiomatic is a 1995 collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... May 19 is the 139th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (140th in leap years). ...

External links

• The Duplicates Paradox by Ben Best; theories about the problem of personal continuity
• Joe Strout's Mind Uploading Home Page
• MindUploading.org
• "Treat Yourself to a New Body" BrainTrans, Inc. Company Website - hoax / humor -link dead: 7-23-06
• "The Day You Discard Your Body" by Marshall Brain
• "The history, theory, and present status of brain transplantation." - Medical paper